In wireless networks, the mechanism to adaptively select a link transmission rate based on channel variations is referred to as RA (rate adaptation). The operation may have a critical impact on the upper-layer application, specifically video streaming which has strict QoS requirements. Thus, RA should consider the QoS requirements and radio conditions at the same time. In this paper, we present a CV-RA (cross-layer video-oriented rate adaptation) scheme for video transmission over multi-rate wireless networks. The transmission rate is switched in a cross-layer optimized way, by simultaneously considering video R-D (rate-distortion) characteristics as well as wireless conditions. At the radio link layer, transmission rate selection is made using cross-layer optimization. As a result of RA, the effective link throughput dynamically changes. At the application layer, video source rate is adaptively controlled using cross-layer adaptation. CV-RA is compared to three traditional RA schemes. It can realize the highest possible visual communications for any channel condition. For the previous schemes, the variations of visual quality is high due to dynamic packet error rates. In contrast, for CV-RA, visual quality improves with the channel condition.